Dr William T. Martin Riches, who died in June 2024 aged 84, was a lecturer in American Studies at the Ulster Polytechnic at Jordanstown, later the University of Ulster, and a noted scholar of the US civil rights movement. Bill was born in born in Tintern, Wales in 1939 and grew up around the Forest of Dean. He read History at the University of Nottingham where, in 1959, he met Judy, the couple marrying in 1963. 

Bill was a journalist in London and Toronto, before pursuing a PhD at the University of Tennessee. In 1973, Bill and Judy, now with two young children, Julia and Theo, took the bold decision to move to Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, when Bill accepted a lectureship at the Ulster Polytechnic. Bill was a huge advocate of polytechnics and passionate about students and learning, commitments he maintained when Jordanstown became part of the University of Ulster. Bill built an enviable range of books and microfilm collections on American history, and, along with Bill Lazenbatt, Tony Emerson, Michael Klein and later Kathleen McCracken, championed American Studies as a discipline. To this end, Bill created student exchanges with US universities and had the foresight to enlist Ulster in the ISEP progamme. Along with many students, I was a beneficiary of Bill’s efforts, majoring in American Studies in the early 1990s and studying at the University of Mississippi. 

In my first encounter with Bill in a lecture, he, with genuine outrage, slammed a chair on the floor to explain the ‘three-fifths’ rule, whereby slaves counted for three-fifths of a person for electoral representation in the new United States, demonstrating the inhumanity of enslavement with people regarded as mere property. I’m not sure the message of this necessarily sunk in at the time, but the memory has stayed with me! Bill put students at the centre of everything. He was always there for chats and feedback, especially when arranging the year abroad or dissertation supervision. 

In class, tangents were common but never unwelcome: for example, Bill predicted the rise of consultants (‘become a consultant, then people will pay you to tell them the bleeding obvious’ (or words to that effect)). Bill would allude to his own time as a journalist and PhD student in the States in the 1960s, and his involvement in civil rights and anti-war protests. On one occasion he spent the night in a Southern jail after a protest. Thankfully, the other prisoners proved curious, rather than hostile to this long-haired hippie with a British accent!

Bill’s support enabled me to spend a transformative year at Ole Miss. Bill – not necessarily with the express permission of the powers that be – would visit his students in the States to see how we were getting on, and came to see me in Oxford, Mississippi. There he arranged for me to join the class of legendary Southern folklorist Bill Ferris; he also tried to order a BLT at legendary local vegetarian café, The Hoka… Bill was very pleased to learn that I had interviewed James Meredith for my dissertation, and then impressed at what I, in my first ever interview, had managed to elicit from a civil rights legend with a notoriously prickly reputation.

One of my favourite memories, which encapsulates Bill’s commitment to his students, came during the pressure of finals and dissertation writing when I bumped into an agitated Bill in the Jordanstown library.

‘You’ve been working!’ Bill thundered. I thought to myself, ‘of course I have, finals are only weeks away’. He elaborated: ‘I’ve heard you have a part-time job! If I’d known about this, I would have phoned your employer and had you sacked, because your degree is too important!’. Changed times!

After completing my MA at Sheffield, and with an eye on doing a PhD, Bill encouraged me to rewrite my BA dissertation on the Ole Miss integration crisis as an article for the Irish Journal of American Studies (IJAS). This peer-reviewed academic piece, prior to even starting a PhD, undoubted helped me secure funding at Hull, and reflected Bill’s confidence in me as a scholar. Once I had started my PhD, he pressed me to revise part of my MA thesis for IJAS, which was also published, meaning that I had a body of peer-reviewed work prior to finishing my doctorate and entering the job market.

Bill was an early member of the Irish Association for American Studies, and co-founder of IJAS, while his well-regarded 1997 book The Civil Rights Movement: Struggle and Resistance study ran through several editions and remains popular among academics and students alike. He and I had discussions about my writing an updated edition; however, issues with publishers meant that unfortunately this came to nothing.  

Bill retired at the turn of the millennium, frustrated at higher education’s increasing bureaucratisation and management-speak. An example of this came when he and experienced colleagues had to go to a teacher training session where the instructor helpfully explained what a student was, and how to teach. Bill’s response was a mixture of incredulity, contempt and hilarity. Perhaps the final straw came when administrators started talking about ‘educational throughput’ instead of ‘students’!

Bill and Judy retired to Newnham-on-Severn, close to where he grew up. I was able to visit them from time-to-time in their lovely home, Middle Watch House. I was delighted, amused and entirely unsurprised, to see him make headlines in July 2017 when, in response to Brexit, he declared his home the Independent Republic of Middlewatch, with Judy as its president, telling the BBC ‘the rest of the country will leave the European Union but we won’t!’ Bill’s radical tendencies remained resolutely untamed by old age!

I am hugely indebted to Bill. On a very personal level, I loved his company, his stories, and his insights, and I miss him enormously. Professionally, without his encouragement and support, I would not have had the rewarding career I have enjoyed, but beyond the loss of my friend and mentor his passing represents a huge loss to the wider intellectual and scholarly community. 

Dr Simon Topping, Associate Professor of United States History, University of Plymouth

The Uncanny States of America: Encountering the Planetary (EJAS Special Issue)
Editors: Dominik Steinhilber (University of Konstanz), Florian Wagner (University of Jena)

Taking into consideration recent developments toward a Planetary Cultural and Literary Studies, this special issue of The European Journal of American Studies aims to rethink and recontextualize the American project not through the homogenizing impulses of the global sublime but through the decentered relationality of planetarity—the act of “making our home unheimlich or uncanny” (Spivak 74). Such a planetary approach to American Studies may be able to more adequately address the multilayered social, political, and ecological crises of the 21st century than previous cosmopolitanist, globalist, or post- as well as transnationalist approaches.
To this day, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass stands as the poetic bible of American democracy and its project of nationhood. Yet the voice that speaks “I am large. I contain multitudes” also connotes the sublime dream of an American national experiment that cannot be contained by the nation alone, “the manifest destiny redreamed” into “a spiritual and secular unity that will unite the globe as one organism” (Fuller 2022). Through the sublime experience of being able to contain multitudes beyond itself (Kant 109), the rational self transcends, sublimity figuring the world as little more than a resource to be absorbed and consumed. Applying the sublime’s inherently anthropocentric and logocentric logic to the national project reveals justifications of dominance over the Other that is ‘Not-Me’. The sublime greatness of the American experiment hence always already contained its deepest abysses, from the exploitation of the racialized other and the environment, excessive nationalism, to U.S. imperialism. Globalization, primarily driven by American capital and culture, and the subsequent crises of global climate change are only the last figuration of the sublime idea of America.
While (ecologically) regulative principles have remained largely inaccessible to the likes of post- and transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and globalism,  the ecocritically informed discourse of planetarity may be better positioned to take on a sense of “stewardship” with fewer politically fraught connotations of paternalism, colonialism, and monopoly capital. In its orientation toward “the radical otherness of the planet” (Chakrabarty 25), planetary thought can leave behind all too narrow notions of nationness and think ethics and relationality beyond the human and beyond national borders and global structures. A form of stewardship based on the planet’s uncanny otherness may thus connote “both an ethics of care for both organic and inorganic planetary resources and a social stance mindful to conserve cultural legacies” (Elias&Moraru xxiv). In this vein, we propose the planetary uncanny as an alternative mode of thinking about our current planet-wide crises. In many ways an uncanny double of the sublime that, however, rescinds sublimity’s sense of closed-offness, mastery, elevation, and control—the uncanny may help construct horizontal ethics and imaginaries of intimacy and contact grounded in otherness. To think globally, is to think the sublime; to think the planetary, on the other hand, is to think uncannily.
Against this background, we seek to mobilize the uncanny as a mode or method of a literary and cultural examination of (a not-yet-realized) planetarity. The special issue invites contributors to think through different modes of the uncanny in order to investigate its potential for subversion, destabilization, and defamiliarization, but also for contact, affect, and jouissance. We want to encourage American Studies scholars from various fields and disciplines to rethink the American project through the planetary uncanny to explore modes of imagining coexistence and contact not through increasing familiarity—meaning an absorption of the other into the self that may only serve homogenization and control—but rather through a profound and indelible, radical alterity. How can American Studies (re)think the sublimity of the American experiment, egalitarianism, democracy, humanism, yet also ecology at large, in terms of the uncanny? How may a closer look at the uncanny states of America, from its beginnings until now, destabilize our traditional perspectives on U.S. ideology, imperialism, and globalism, and allow for the return of a repressed planetary thought and imaginaries that deal in coexistence and uncertainty?

Potential contributors should send a 500 word abstract and a short biographical note to dominik.steinhilber@uni-konstanz.de and florian.wagner@uni-jena.de by December 31, 2024. Contributors will be notified of their acceptance by January 19, 2025 Finished articles (5,000-7,500 words; newest MLA style) should be submitted by May 31, 2025. All disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches are welcome, and topics may include, but are not limited to:

•    Critical (re)readings of American canonical and non-canonical texts through a planetary lens
•    Theoretical and historical reflections on the sublime and the uncanny in the context of globalism, imperialism, and the planetary.
•    Indigenous methodologies and literatures in relation to planetarity.
•    Issues of planetarity and eco-cosmopolitanism, environmental responsibility.
•    Critiques of the Anthropocene and related concepts (e.g., Capitalocene, Cthulucene etc)
•    Human and non-human agencies in the Anthropocene in relation to notions of the uncanny, the eerie, and the weird.
•    Issues relating to material ecocriticism (e.g. questions of materiality and ‘storied’ matter)
•    Multi-species ethnography, plant life (writing)
•    Engagement with petrocultures, petrochemical landscapes
•    Religion and the supernatural in American literature and thought

The special issue is planned to be published in late 2026. Please feel free to contact dominik.steinhilber@uni-konstanz.de and florian.wagner@uni-jena if you need further information.

Works Cited:
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 46, no. 1, 2019, pp. 167–92.
Elias, Amy J and Christian Moraru, eds. The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century. Northwestern UP, 2015.
Fuller, William R. “Love and Imperialism: Reading Whitman’s Leaves of Grass Through Edward Carpenter and Maurice Bucke.” Inquiries Journal vol. 14, no. 03, 2022.
Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. Oxford UP, 2008.
Horn, Eva and Hannes Bergthaller. The Anthropocene: Key Issues for the Humanities. Routledge, 2020.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. Columbia University Press, 2003.